Take a Deep Breath
A long time ago I discovered that people who've never left Earth have
certain fixed ideas about conditions in space. Everyone "knows," for
example, that a man dies instantly and horribly when exposed to the
vacuum that exists beyond the atmosphere. You'll find numerous gory
descriptions of exploded space travelers in the popular literature, and
I won't spoil your appetite by repeating them here. Many of those
tales, indeed, are basically true. I've pulled men back through the
air lock who were very poor advertisements for space flight.
Yet, at the same time, there are exceptions to every rule even this one
I should know, for I learned the hard way.
We were on the last stages of building Communications Satellite Two;
all the main units had been joined together, the living quarters had
been pressurised, and the station had been given the slow spin around
its axis that had restored the unfamiliar sensation of weight. I say
"slow," but at its rim our two-hundred-toot-diameter wheel was turning
at thirty miles an hour. We had, of course, no sense of motion, but
the centrifugal force caused by this spin gave us about half the weight
we would have possessed on Earth. That was enough to stop things from
drifting around, yet not enough to make us feel uncomfortably sluggish
after our weeks with no weight at all.
Four of us were sleeping in the small cylindrical cabin known as
Bunkhouse Number 6 on the night that it happened. The bunkhouse was at
the very rim of the station; if you imagine a bicycle wheel, with a
string of sausages replacing the tire, you have a good idea of the
layout.
Bunkhouse Number 6 was one of these sausages, and we were slumbering
peacefully inside it.
I was awakened by a sudden jolt that was not violent enough to cause me
alarm, but which did make me sit up and wonder what had happened.
Anything unusual in a space station demands instant attention, so I
reached for the intercom switch by my bed.
"Hello, Central," I called.
"What was that?"
There was no reply; the line was dead.
Now thoroughly alarmed, I jumped out of bed and had an even bigger
shock. There was no gravity. I shot up to the ceiling before I was
able to grab a stanchion and bring myself to a halt, at the cost of a
sprained wrist.
It was impossible for the entire station to have suddenly stopped
rotating. There was only one answer; the failure of the intercom and,
as I quickly discovered, of the lighting circuit as well forced us to
face the appalling truth. We were no longer part of the station our
little cabin had somehow come adrift, and had been slang off into space
like a raindrop falling off a spinning flywheel.
There were no windows through which we could look out, but we were not
in complete darkness, for the battery powered emergency lights had come
on. All the main air vents had closed automatically when the pressure
dropped. For the time being, we could live in our own private
atmosphere, even though it was not being renewed. Unfortunately, a
steady whistling told us that the air we did have was escaping through
a leak somewhere in the cabin.
There was no way of telling what had happened to the rest of the
station. For all we knew, the whole structure might have come to
pieces, and all our colleagues might be dead or in the same predicament
as we drifting through space in leaking cans of air. Our one slim hope
was the possibility that we were the only castaways, that the rest of
the station was intact and had been able to send a rescue team to find
us. After all, we were receding at no more than thirty miles an hour,
and one of the rocket scooters could catch up to us in minutes.
It actually took an hour, though without the evidence of my watch I
should never have believed that it was so short a time. We were now
gasping for breath and the gauge on our single emergency oxygen tank
had dropped to one division above zero.
The banging on the wall seemed like a signal from another world. We
banged back vigorously, and a moment later a muffled voice called to us
through the wall. Someone outside was lying with his space-suit helmet
pressed against the metal, and his shouted words were reaching us by
direct conduction. Not as clear as radio but it worked.
The oxygen gauge crept slowly down to zero while' we had our council of
war. We would be dead before we could be towed back to the station;
yet the rescue ship was only a few feet away from us, with its air lock
already open. Our little problem was to cross that few feet without
space suits.
We made our plans carefully, rehearsing our actions in the full
knowledge that there could be no repeat performance. Then we each took
a deep, final swig of oxygen, flushing out our lungs. When we were all
ready, I banged on the wall to give the signal to our friends waiting
outside.
There was a series of short, staccato raps as the power tools got to
work on the thin hull. We clung tightly to the stanchions, as far away
as possible from the point of entry, knowing just what would happen.
When it came, it was so sudden that the mind couldn't record the
sequence of events. The cabin seemed to explode, and a great wind
tugged at me. The last trace of air gushed from my lungs, through my
already-opened mouth. And then utter silence, and the stars shining
through the gaping hole that led to life.
Believe me, I didn't stop to analyze my sensations. I think though I
can never be sure that it wasn't imagination that my eyes were smarting
and there was a tingling feeling all over my body. And I felt very
cold, perhaps because evaporation was already starting from my skin.
The only thing I can be certain of is that uncanny silence. It is
never completely quiet in a space station, for there is always the
sound of machinery or air pumps. But this was the absolute silence of
the empty void, where there is no trace of air to carry sound.
Almost at once we launched ourselves out through the shattered wall,
into the full blast of the sun. I was instantly blinded but that
didn't matter, because the men waiting in space suits grabbed me as
soon as I emerged and hustled me into the air lock. And there, sound
slowly returned as the air rushed in, and we remembered we could
breathe again. The entire rescue, they told us later, had lasted just
twenty seconds.... Well, we were the founding members of the Vacuum
Breathers Club. Since then, at least a dozen other men have done the
same thing, in similar emergencies. The record time in space is now
two minutes; after that, the blood begins to form bubbles as it boils
at body temperature, and those bubbles soon get to the heart.
In my case, there was only one aftereffect. For maybe a quarter of a
minute I had been exposed to real sunlight, not the feeble stuff that
filters down through the atmosphere of Earth. Breathing space didn't
hurt me at all but I got the worst dose of sunburn I've ever had in my
life.